From Eurozine Review, October 18:
Politicizing resource scarcity
Il Mulino 3/2023
Eurozine Review
18 October 2023
Against resource determinism: why wars over water aren’t inevitable; taking back
control of food; and why climate change isn’t the fault of humanity.
Since the 1990s, water has been called the ‘oil of the twenty-first century’ or the ‘blue gold’ over which wars will inevitably be fought. This grim future is particularly associated with the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-poor region, where the effects of climate change add to the perennial problem of low rainfall.
But as Hussam Hussein observes in Il Mulino, ‘the empirical evidence linking water scarcity and armed conflicts between states is inconclusive’. The equation ‘neglects socio-economic issues and questions about who has access to how much water and why’.
Political processes of inclusion and exclusion are central. In India, for instance, lower caste women are denied access to wells; while in the West Bank, water scarcity is an issue of structural discrimination.
Purely technical solutions to scarcity such as the construction of dams and other market-oriented mega-projects often have catastrophic effects on poor communities. Inversely, treating limited resources as a matter of access and equity can bring about genuine solutions. ‘Water diplomacy can contribute to broader regional cooperation, stability, peace and security,’ writes Hussein.
Food as public good
Threats to food security tend to be seen primarily in terms of scarcity. Yet global agricultural production grew by 53 per cent between 2000 and 2019, compared to a 26 per cent increase in the world’s population during the same period. According to Marco Clementi and Martino Tognocchi, ‘food security can be affected more by problems of access than by food shortages’.....
....MUCH MORE
Also from Il Mulino at Eurozine Review: Italy's She-cession.
As noted in the outro from 2021's "Priciest food since 1970s is a big challenge for governments":
...One part of the Arab Spring narrative that we paid particular attention to was Syria. Here's a footnote from one post:
note: Example #10 on Syria's 2005 - 2008 drought links to a paper that lays the blame for Syria's civil war on human-caused climate change.
This may be in error as 1) attribution studies are tricky beasties. 2) the assumed proximal source of conflict, crop failure, was found by later research to not have occurred with anywhere near the assumed extent.
3) A factor in bringing on the civil war, at least as large as the weather, was the fact the West, led by the United States as part of the Arab Spring, decided to arm counter-Assad ISIS and other Jihadi forces to overthrow the Assad government.
And the introduction to another:
"The WEF Global Risks Interconnections Map"
I was debating whether to post this because the author uses a weather/climate attribution for the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that is not really true. I'm sure the folks at New England Complex Systems Institute meant well but, as just one example, Syria, the poster child of the of the climate > conflict story favored by the explainers and attributors of that time was brought to civil war, not by the drought that was going on but by Western governments exporting weapons from Libya to Syria (the ratlines) after the murder of Gaddafi. The amount of wheat on the Syrian market did not fall as much as some have portrayed, and with government-backed imports there was nothing that odd going on. It was after the war was started that wheat production was cut in half, and by 2015 the academics were calling out the specious claims:
https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/geography/2015/12/09/why-prince-charles-is-wrong-on-syria-and-climate-change/We were keeping a pretty close eye on things and did not see what the fabulists were pitching.
All that being said the graph is interesting....
